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When we’re looking for a job, most of us make it our business to know what’s going on in the field we’re trying to pursue. We’re up on government laws that impact our business practices and norms. We’re savvy about emerging trends and innovative opportunities. But when we get the job and have been in it for a while, we can allow ourselves to get bogged down with just day to day business… you could even say we get complacent, and we forget about the value we wanted to add to the nature of our business by staying informed. What about the time it takes to do research?
In this day and age, we don’t have to worry about time consuming research – most of the time someone else is already doing it for us. I enjoy reading Making Change, because Cathy Moore offers different ways to look at planning and implementing an instructional project, truly lively ideas for elearning. It’s not extremely technical, but offers a real world perspective about the practice of instructional design – putting it into context. I work with a small business, and I’m relatively new in the field, so this is huge for me in my daily activities. Also, if you go to the site and scroll through the categories, you’ll find some very insightful tips and helpful reading.
Another resource that I adore for now is onlineteachingtips.org. A great number of contributors are linked to this site, with online courses that you can actually go in and view. I could spend a great deal of time here, because my company’s focus is on the adult learner who has little time and often takes our courses outside their normal daily routine. I peruse these sites to look at how some of the big guns are teaching online and delivering nontraditional material. This site doesn’t have live feed, so it doesn’t deliver me updates in real time, but who cares? It’s great to visit it, and I can do it just by clicking the link right here on my blog. (So can you)
Finally, because I work with a company called Parentpoints, and we make it our business to know how parents and educators are communicating or not communicating…and what they’re considering to be priority issues, I have a link to PTA Community. Unlike PTO, which is geared more toward fundraising, PTA focuses on the issues that impact the family and, consequently, children and education.
Five, ten years ago, information would never have been so accessible as it is today. Yes, we have to be careful and decide on the authenticity of some of the information we’re getting, but wasn’t that always the case? (And isn’t Myth Busters, along with countless organizations continually proving that we didn’t do such a good job of that in the past – say, hundreds of years). As a jumping off point, I have to say the information accessibility is phenomenal! So use it!
Is training really the answer? Ask the flowchart.
11 months ago
“On a mission to save the world from boring corporate elearning.” Cathy Moore.
ReplyDeleteI have followed Cathy Moore for about a year. She has over 25 years of elearning, technical writing, marketing and remote learning experience under her belt. She has designed and written materials for a variety of age groups, educational audiences and professional communities. Her blog, Making Change- Ideas for Lively elearning, is a quick and easy to read blog site that is dedicated just for elearning courses. Cathy Moore gives her readers tips to use immediately, quick and to the point advice that is based on research and a has provided an online space for instructional design professionals to share ideas and learn from one another.
This week’s video post “The big mistake in eLearning” that she posted on her blog is quite insightful. In particular, I found the tips on handling the task of what is seemingly an “information dump” and transforming it into an effective eLearning module to be very interesting. Moore’s recommendation of asking directed questions to determine goals and “real-life” behaviors that the requested training should address give me a better idea of where to begin with a new course when one is requested of me. I also find the perspective of bring experiential activities to the forefront of the learning instead of focusing simply on passing along information to the learners. The learning by practice approach seems to be one that would be much more effective than the standard information dissemination and review approach.